Google Doodle Celebrates Indian-American Artist Zarina Hashmi On Her 86th Birthday, Know All About Her Life

On the 86th anniversary of Zarina Hashmi's birth, Google created a beautiful doodle in her honour. Her affiliation with the minimalist movement is what makes her the most popular.

Google Doodle: The focus of today's Doodle is printmaker and Indian-American artist Zarina Hashmi, who is recognised as one of the key figures in the minimalist movement. Guest illustrator Tara Anand from New York highlights Hashmi's use of geometric and minimalist abstract shapes to explore ideas of home, displacement, and borders in her illustrations. 

Google Doodle Today: Zarina Hashmi's Early Life

On this day in 1937, Hashmi was born in the little Indian city of Aligarh. Before India was divided in 1947, she and her four siblings had a happy existence. Millions of people were forced to evacuate due to this awful occurrence, and Zarina's family was compelled to go to Karachi in the newly founded Pakistan.

At age 21, Hashmi wed a young diplomat in the diplomatic service and set out to traverse the globe. She travelled to Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she was exposed to printing and modernist and abstract art trends.

Google Doodle Today: Zarina Hashmi's Work

In 1977, Hashmi relocated to New York City, where she emerged as an enthusiastic advocate of black and female artists. She quickly became a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist journal that investigated the nexus between politics, art, and social justice.

She then became a professor at the New York Feminist Art Institute, which offered female artists equal educational chances. She collaborated in the exhibition's co-curation in 1980 at A.I.R. Gallery, titled "Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States." This ground-breaking exhibition featured work from several artists and gave female artists of colour a platform. 

Google Doodle Today: Zarina Hashmi and The Minimalism Movement

Hashmi, an avid supporter of minimalism art, rose to fame for her stunning intaglio and woodcut prints that blend semi-abstract representations of the homes and locations she has lived in. Inscriptions in her native Urdu and geometric designs influenced by Islamic art were frequently seen in her creations. 

Hashmi's works are still being looked at by people all over the world since they are part of prestigious museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. 

Zarina died in London on April 25, 2020, as the result of complications from her Alzheimer's disease.